The reception of “Cleopatra” in Russia rested on two main pillars – the play by Shakespeare (whose most important Russian translator had been Boris Pasternak) as well as an oriental poem which Alexander Pushkin embedded into his story Egyptian Nights. In language both sensual and cold, Pushkin recounts how Cleopatra attends an opulent banquet and, tired of constant courtship, promises three men one night each, for which they pay with their lives. Thereby, Cleopatra liberates herself from the role of a victim of male sexual fantasies, dramatically reversing the balance of power between the sexes in a kind of feminist act. The two literary models, especially Cleopatra’s death scene as described by Shakespeare, but also Pushkin’s poem, are introduced here in a musical guise: in Sergey Prokofiev’s rarely-performed incidental music of 1934, the text is recited as a melodrama.